Before you can shape government policy, you have to know your audience

When we first started to focus on policy development at Go Daddy, the company was quite small and there was no corporate history to review to determine what approach the company had taken in the past. Instead, the management team left it to me to determine what needed to be done. They were all busy growing the business and making products. As a person who likes to be in charge and make things up from scratch, this was ideal. I would get to write the playbook, step by step.

What I learned, by trial and error, was that I needed to know who could make a difference in the Internet policy world, and who I needed to know to get things done. It didn’t take long to understand that who you need to know depends on the space in which you exist.

For example, intellectual property is a big issue on the Internet. The laws relevant to protecting trademarks and copyrights on the Internet are mostly contained in federal statues, like the Lanham Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). Jurisdiction over intellectual property statutes usually falls to the judiciary committees of the House and Senate, although there are, of course, exceptions. In the case of IP protection on the Internet, therefore, I found out I needed to engage with members of the judiciary committees of both the House and Senate in order to make new or different policy.

In the Internet context, and again, knowing your context is important, it turned out most key policy was initially shaped by the federal government. Statutes like the Communications Decency Act (CDA), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), and the Fraudulent Online Identities Sanctions Act (FOISA) became as familiar to us as a set of acronym-laden abbreviations could. Again, each statute was enacted by the federal government.

But, there is also the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy, which is not a law at all, but rather a contractual agreement that binds domain name registrars and registrants to handle domain name disputes in certain top level domains a certain way. The federal government had nothing to do with that policy, but yet, it governs every domain name registration in the .com, .net. and .org name spaces, among others.

And, there are also a variety of computer crimes and privacy statutes enacted by various states and foreign countries, some very recently, with which we became familiar at Go Daddy.

So, at least in our case, we had law and policy from a variety of sources impacting our business, including many states, the federal government, foreign governments and contracting parties. To shape policy, and make new or different laws, it was important to understand the regulators and processes that gave rise to each.

To begin to determine your policy audience, you should know the answers to at least the following questions:

Does your business operate mostly under local or state rules? Or, is it controlled principally by federal statutes?

Are there non-statutory legal requirements with which your business must comply? This would be more than the standard business contracts with which we all have to live, of course. Non-statutory legal requirements could take the form of contractually binding dispute resolution procedures, collective bargaining agreements, industry standards like accounting pronouncements, or other similarly binding and potentially liability-producing mandates.

Do you have operations outside the U.S., where foreign rules may vary widely from those applicable in the U.S.?

While it seems thoughtful and conscientious to monitor policy development, and engage policy makers, at every level, all but the most well-funded policy-focused organizations have to determine where they will place their limited resources. Most organizations do not have the luxury of being everywhere and working on every issue. So you have to know your audience.

Who can and should you engage on policy issues? Who can make the biggest difference, positive or negative, in the ongoing operations of your company? Who is responsible for establishing the set of rules or laws that will have the most detrimental impact if your company fails to comply? And what policy makers are paying attention to your company’s space? Those people and/or groups comprise your audience. You must figure out who they are and then, absolutely, get to know them.

Contributing Author

Christine Jones

As Go Daddy’s first in-house lawyer, Christine Jones built the legal department from the ground up. In her more than ten years there, Ms....